PREVIOUSLY… I got Long Covid, badly. Mostly hit me neurologically; Parkinsons’s and ME type symptoms. Then my wife got anal cancer. She’s been in remission for 2 years now, thank fuck… and we’re rebuilding our lives from that, slowly.
Meanwhile, we watched, isolated and housebound, as pretty much everyone else in the world who wasn’t a crip just decided to say Fuck Masks. Genocide as convenience. While literal fascism roams the land.
As a result of this, my magic has become more… militant. I say no more.
Yeah, so not had many spoons, as they say.
But as the year is ending – and also my infrequent newsletter is having to shut down because Mailchimp are cunts – I’m making a resolution.
To write shit down. Keep broadcasting when I can. Here, mostly.
I’m on as many of the non-Twitters as are reasonable (I hate Instagram the most, Bluesky, fucking Facebook or dear Tumblr probably easiest for me to actually see it.) But if it’s longer than a not-tweet, I’ll say it here.
Because I am angry, scared and so very disappointed in my fellow humans for the most part and am disinclined to take any shit from them, ever again. And I will keep talking, keep writing, while I still can. I have the hardware and nous to keep going if my neurology worsens.
I will therefore remain to remind you that this bitter old cunning-man, somehow about to turn 60 years old, is far from done.
After all these years of pain, fear, illness, rising literal fucking fascism and the worst of cyberpunk futures without hardly any of the good bits, I have come to a realisation. Well, a working model for me that fits the data.
This is Hell.
Once I realised and accepted that, the symbolism of that path kicked in hard.
It mostly stemmed from the continual use of it as a process and metaphor in Nick Harkaway’s Gnomon, which as I mention below has become to me what The Invisibles is for most chaotes – it combined so well with my stuff.
The process is called Catabasis. And you know how I love those cat puns.
At least while I walk through Hell (symbolically – only places I walk outdoors these days is to and fro doctors), life itself is not awful here. We’re both as well as possible considering, our son’s here for the holidays, I’m on a good drug regime for the symptoms.
And oh yeah I FUCKING KICKED FENTANYL.
Been on patches since the spine started some nine years ago – only thing that controlled the level 10 shooting arm pain – and was just left on them after the 2017 cyborg operation until my GP realised they could possibly be adding to my chronic fatigue and so we agreed to wean me off that shit.
I have to say my mood – which has ranged from black humour to black horror to black depression (to thankfully occasionally loving horniness with the missus which keeps us both stable, frankly) – immediately improved. But then again, they put me on that ol’fashioned morphine to wean me off the fentanyl and I also have weed so I am currently feeling pretty fucking good, to be honest. At least, the constant roar of pain is a murmur for now, so I can rub two brain cells together for once.
I had lost my optimism completely, in my catabasis. But now I remember the old battle-words…
We do not fight Nazis because we think we will win. We fight them because they are fucking Nazis.
Solidarity with the fighters for freedom under fascism. Yes, that includes Palestine, and oppressed Jews. It especially includes trans, non-binary and queer people. I think you may have gathered, crip people especially.
It includes any victim of those beliefs which Iain Banks condemned – any cause that makes children die.
Fuck them. The Useless Eaters will outlast your neglect and contempt out of pure fucking spite, one by one, until we go.
But that’s the thing about disabled people… life just keeps making more and more of us.
Anyway, on to more cheery stuff to see the new year out.
—
I read a lot of fiction. Because of my spinal injury, I have to read books solely as ebooks, on a tablet strapped above my head in bed, and that posture’s good for the cyborg spine bits so I read a couple of hours every night. Only fiction, or there’s a higher chance of bingeing-until-dawn/taking extensive notes like I’m on the fucking Rocinante on the float. (I stop on good cliffhanger chapters.)
Honestly, half of what I read this year was fairly generic genre material off Kindle Unlimited… but of the good stuff, I’d recommend…
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys – a very queer and trans friendly cozy post-apocalypse first contact story. Rich, deep, reads like silk. Just wonderful.
Conquest by Nina Allan – another banger by one of the most underrated women in Brit SF, this one a quietly told tale of a possible alien invasion only detected by a small group of late C20 conspiracy theorists (who, synchronistically enough, all seem to have lived in my various ends in Kent and South East London!).
The Exoskeleton Quartet by Shane Stadler – This is an extraordinary set of books exploring the human condition, always the core goal of SF, but it comes with a huge content warning because the first book is roughly 80% body horror about using a medically connected exoskeleton on condemned prisoners to automate causing severe agony in order to force out-of-body experiences… the detail on this is described very precisely. But if you can bear such, it goes to some amazing places, and a fuckload of Nazis die horribly.
I’m a big fan of Gareth Powell, but I hadn’t read his earlier work so his breakthrough Ack-Ack Macaque series was quite something. Crafty and vicious dissection of war, VR and politics through its titular Spitfire Ace and all-around bad-ass macaque.
Kirsty’s reading has tilted heavily towards queer romance as comfort food, and occasionally points me to some. I’m glad to see the biggest genre in the world open up and be accepted more these days, as there’s some excellent writing to be found. My favourites were The Unholy Trifecta series by AJ Sherwood (mostly gay but occasionally bi pairings of assassins, mercs and thieves with both civilians and their mutual battlefield adoption of a young girl who’s at least as smart as they are) and Colleen Cowley’s Clandestine Magic trilogy, a retelling of the early days of American Women’s Suffrage but in a universe where magic
A. works and
B. supposedly only men have it… and the woman who discovers that B. is a lie.
Another discovery was the work of qntm, a male Brit writer who debuted in the SCP Foundation forums with his short pieces, later fixed up into the book There Is No Antimemetics Division. Intensely clever but always readable, he delves into the impact on our world of anti-memes; ideas that do not want to be remembered or passed on, and take active measures to ensure this. All 4 of his novels are wonderful and I’d say Ed is the easiest entry point.
I liked Grant Morrison’s debut novel Luda well enough right up until the ending. Which was meh.
This was the year I discovered a sadly deceased woman SF writer had penned one of the all-time great time travel series. Kage Baker’s The Company runs to some 12 novels and 5 novellas, the last story published some 3 years after her death in 2009. These are just so damn clever. A megacorp discovers 2 world-changing pieces of kit: time travel (with limits) and immortality (with limits). In order to mazimise the profit from these, they recruit kids at the point of their deaths throughout time and send them back (often further back than their birth time) as immortal cyborg operatives to basically steal historical artefacts… and what happens when several groups of them rebel.(That time-travel-for-profit trick also pops up in our beloved St. Mary’s Priory series by Jodi Taylor, which continues to delight and, as usual, had a novel and a Xmas novella this year.) It smartly keeps the focus throughout the series on a handful of characters – one of whom, The Botanist Mendoza, becomes one of the all great heroines and so much more. A wonderful discovery, and a sad loss.
And, as I have every year since publication, I reread Gnomon by Nick Harkaway, which has become for me what The Invisibles was for practically every chaos magician in the Nineties, except not deliberately. (Although Nick is certainly smart enough to note that writing a book about alchemy and synchronicity is likely to be conducive to both.) I learn more about myself and my times on every read. I also read his latest, Titanium Noir: much shorter and less obviously complex, it’s a lean noir tale of a world where the rich (known as Titans) are, due to a side-effect of the immortality drugs only they get, physically huge. Guts capitalism with a stiletto.
Lots of telly – I praise the saints that someone got to make Slow Horses properly and that it’s a hit – and the usual constant FPS as my wellness sim.
Finished first Starfield run after wife let me get new XBox as early 60th/Xmas present. It was pretty fun, but buggy as fuck. Like life really – ooh, deep!
I really enjoyed Dead Island 2: found the Londoner character Jacob convincing and it’s a joy to play, like a less finicky Dying Light 2 – and funnier.
And a special shoutout to my online tabletop RPG groups. They’re the majority of my social life and I am so damn grateful for them. Extra big love to Tom and Matt, our GM’s.
So, you know, it’s not like Hell is that bad for me… but that constant hint of sulphur in every news item or development in automated callousness in the service of the TESCREAL fuckwits pervades everything.
Fuck them all.
Happy New Year.
May it bring you at least what you need, and only what you can bear.
First off… thanks for those who wrote back about One Thousand Days. Glad it struck a spark with folk, both crip and abled.
One of the things I mentioned there was my increasing involvement with other cyborgs and various disabled communities (god that sounds like some awful care home doesn’t it? I’m sticking with ‘crip groups’ thanks).
As a follow-up, here’s a piece I wrote for r/cyborgs_only: I’d been talking a bit about the Shrine of the Useless Eaters with Cy and she asked for my thoughts.
As I wrote this during the process of doing 1k Days, there’s come overlap; hope it’s still of some interest nonetheless.
I figured the easiest way in to a spirituality which didn’t require a religious adherence and was thus available to atheist/agnostic people was ancestor veneration in a kind of chaoc magic approach; and, as my old pal Ru Callender (who has a book out about his work as an alternative undertaker) taught me, we can choose our ancestors just as much as we choose our family-of-choice, creating ancestral lines of kith instead of kin.
TOWARDS A CYBORG SPIRITUALITY
I became a cyborg on 11 December 2017ce.
The procedure was a double discectomy with fusion of the C5 to C7 vertebrae, as a result of burst discs and the need to remove bone spurs from inside those vertebrae which were growing into my spinal nerves. This neurological damage was causing both severe shooting pain in both arms and a massive loss of sensation in my hands. (And also, a complete lack of humour re. Donald Trump jokes about his bone spurs.)
The operation was as successful as possible. The awful pain stopped, and most of the sensory loss in my hands was regained. Plus, I got a really sexy scar on my neck, and could give as answer when asked why it was there, that ‘I had my throat cut by professionals’.
I could and can still feel the place where the titanium was bolted to my skeleton, where the double helix latticework surrounding it was fusing with my bones. Last week, while thinking about the Borg Diem project, I came up with the term ‘Interfascia’ for that place ‘where the metal meets the meat’.
The other word I offered was ‘Borgods’. They are the subject of this piece.
Before I was a cyborg, I was a crip. Was never a healthy child (actually blinded by hay fever conjunctivitis at the age of 9 for a couple of days, always prone to flu and such, then diagnosed as Type II diabetic at 40 by developing gangrene in my foot after a martial arts injury). Diabetes leaves one prone to other ailments: in my case, Dupuytren’s Contracture (‘trigger finger’) and early onset arthritis in my knees.
I was also, I regret to say, involved with what Cy would now call Tryborg culture. I was one of the people involved in a web-based side project from the comic book Doktor Sleepless by Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez. The book is set in a near-future where DIY transhumanists – known as Grinders – attempt to upgrade their bodies with whatever they have to hand. The book became a major influence on the biohacker movement.
Sorry about that.
(And even sorrier that Ellis was later outed as a serial sexual predator, using his fame and power to manipulate literally hundreds of women.)
But before all this, I was a nerd and a practicing magician.
My interest in what I usually just call ‘weird shit’ began at the age of seven, and persisted throughout a life which has had some quite odd moments. Because this began in the early Seventies and I was a working-poor kid, my resources were scarce. The local library was kind and gave me adult book access very early (Aleister Crowley before you’re ten is… educational). But British TV and other media at the time was rife with supernatural oddness, with shows like Children Of The Stones, Ace Of Wands, The Changes, Sky and others firing my imagination, alongside books by the likes of both Colin and Robert Anton Wilson, various fringe materials such as Chariots of the Gods? and Bermuda Triangle conspiracy theories, and the rise of paranormal celebrities such as Uri Geller.
A huge SF and horror nerd already, my paranormal experiences and love of low culture media combined into something I later discovered was being paralleled by magicians in Leeds and London; a form which eventually became known as chaos magic.
A key aspect of chaos magic, for those who don’t know, is that belief is treated as a tool: something which can be adopted and maintained fiercely for the duration of a magical working and then simply dropped and swapped for something else. As the system drew heavily from SF and fantasy (its eight pointed Chaosphere symbol from Michael Moorcock, the colours of magic associated with each point from Terry Pratchett), the use of pop culture characters as entities to be invoked or even worshipped was common.
My first exposure to the idea that we could create and work with new gods came from a Jewish atheist SF writer, Harlan Ellison. In the introduction to his 1975 collection Deathbird Stories, he wrote:
“As the time passes for men and women, so does it pass for gods, for they are made viable and substantial only through the massed beliefs of masses of men and women. And when puny mortals no longer worship at their altars, the gods die. To be replaced by newer, more relevant gods. Perhaps one day soon the time will pass for Jehovah and Buddha and Zoroaster and Brahma. Then the Earth will know other gods. Already we begin to worship these other, newer gods. Already the Church fights to hold its own. The young grow away from the old religions, the world seems to swing between the old and the new; more and more each day, interest in the occult, in the magical, in the phantasmagorical surges to the fore, leaving priests and rabbis and ministers concerned where their next god will come from. This group of stories deals with the new gods, with the new devils, with the modern incarnations of the little people and the wood sprites and the demons.
The grimoires and NECRONOMICONs of the gods of the freeway, of the ghetto blacks, of the coaxial cable; the paingod and the rock god and the god of neon; the god of legal tender, the god of business-as-usual and the gods that live in city streets and slot machines. The God of Smog and the God of Freudian Guilt. The Machine God. They are a strange, unpredictable lot, these new, vital, muscular gods. How we will come to worship them, what boons they may bestow, their moods and their limitations; these are the subjects of these stories. A New Testament of deities for the computerized age of confrontation and relevance. A grimoire and a guide. A pantheon of the holiest of holies for modern man. Know them now – they rule the nights through which we move.”
They certainly ruled mine.
Eventually, this would lead to a career as a Fortean journalist (I was the first to write longform on the Slenderman phenomenon and later covered the Waukesha tragedy caused by belief in that hyperreal entity for Fortean Times), involvement in political action (first in queer politics then opposition to Dominionist Christianity, the parent of the current Q and Proud Boy movements) and involvement with a series of public magical workings with a political leaning, such as various ceremonies connected to the British Discordian revival of interest in the work of Robert Anton Wilson (a lifelong crip due to childhood polio and a huge Star Trek fan) and several workings to curse the fascist Brexit project alongside the art-rock band The Indelicates.
With this as background, I would like to share some of my approach to working with gods – both known to be fictional and alleged to be historical – as a way of engaging with disability and cyborg existence.
When I fell ill in February of 2020 after giving a talk on magic and authenticity in London, I figured the flu-like symptoms would pass. When they did not, I thought I could handle the feeling of constant illness for a few months – I had dealt with the spinal problem and my cyborg transformation, I could handle this…
That was two and a half years ago. My condition, a form of Long Covid with neurological symptoms, got worse. And, in the midst of the strange times that awful disease has wrought, alongside the rise of blatant fascism worldwide, I fell into a deep depression.
Through lockdown and ever since, me and my wife (who has had ME/CFS for all of our nearly thirty years together and saw much that was painfully familiar in my condition) have had a tradition of making Sunday nights Date Night. We would make a nice meal and take turns choosing a movie to watch together. Often, these would be documentaries (not some folks’ idea of date material, but we both love learning new things – Neophiles, in Bob Wilson’s term). One that hit us both especially hard was Crip Camp (2020), about the early days of disability activism. This birthed in me a need to be more active in crip political agitation, but in our condition, there wasn’t much we could actually do aside from be grouchy on Twitter.
Then I picked out a Date Night film I had been interested in for some time: Marwencol (2010).
The film is a biography of the artist Mark Hogancamp, and his singular creation which gave the film its name. After a brutal mugging led to severe brain damage, Mark (like so many crips) had to develop a set of highly personal mental and physical approaches to his new existence. In his case, his toolkit was to build in his garden a hugely detailed model town in 1/12th scale, populated by customised figures of the GI Joe/Action Man variety.
This was partly a physical therapy, a way of redeveloping his hand/eye coordination using readily available hobby materials, but in developing the deep history of Marwencol (his conception of a small Belgian town occupied by the Nazis and then freed by a combination of American GIs and local resistance fighters), he was able to confront the trauma of his attack… by envisaging the various brutally killed Nazi figures as his abusers.
Whether he knew it consciously or not, that’s as direct a piece of sympathetic magic as I have ever heard of.
Back when I had the gangrenous foot, I was under enforced bedrest for about two months while the foot healed from the debridement of the rotting meat there. (Debridement – such a delicate term for such an agonising procedure to wake up from.)
While I lay in bed with this Cronenbergian vaginal opening granulating slowly, I acquired an XBox. I soon found that first person shooters were, for me at least, a kind of wellness sim. I could be someone who could walk! Run! JUMP! And gun down countless enemies while doing so. It kept me calm while I healed, and my love for FPS continues.
In the midst of my Long Covid depression, I had watched helplessly as the far right wing’s grip on the modern world tightened. The path from the Sad/Angry Puppies furore at the Hugo awards, the GamerGate ructions and their sequels, QAnon, Brexit mania and Trumpism seemed a clear line, and one with no good end.
I took again to my gaming habit, deciding an apt replay would be the modern reimagining of the Wolfenstein series. The modern incarnation is a far cry (yes, I also like Far Cry) from its 8-bit origin; the hero B.J. Blazkowicz now a philosophical warrior-poet fighting in a resistance in an alternate universe where the Nazis won and dominate the world.
Luckily – or perhaps fatedly – I found the limited edition of the game with the 1/12 scale figure of ‘Terror Billy’ was still available. And once I had my hands on this plastic incarnation of a character who, in the game New Colossus, becomes a cyborg from the neck down, I had an idea.
There seem to be an awful lot of cyborg protagonists in first person shooters. John-117, the Master Chief in the HALO series; the variously shaped and gendered incarnations of V in Cyberpunk 2077 – the synchronicity of the male version of V in the game sharing my name was not lost on me. And Adam Jensen of the Deus Ex prequels; whose often-memed line in the first game is for me a fundamental difference between us and the tryborgs…
“I never asked for this”.
Although I lacked both the money and the space to build an entire village of 1/12 scale cyborg heroes fighting the fash, I could at least make a small shrine to these new cyborg gods. My own private Marwencol.
As there was a space on my bookshelf opposite my bed where my Warren Ellis comics used to live, I felt that was the perfect area for something… righteous. Something I could see when I woke up every day, to help me get out of bed and get on with my life.
I gave up the idea of relative scale, but I did want one more 1/12 figure to balance BJ, so I went old school and acquired a vintage Steve Austin figure.
(The original Martin Caidin novels that The Six Million Dollar Man drew from were a lot stranger than the show, its Bigfoot encounter notwithstanding. For example, in Cyborg IV – published the same year as Deathbird Stories – Austin has his bionic limbs and sense organs removed and the interfaces used to join him with an armed space shuttle, making him a living spaceship.)
I picked up an Adam Jensen figure and one of Vic Stone aka Cyborg from Justice League and Doom Patrol; Luke Skywalker and Seven Of Nine joined them. And then I realised the shrine could also be not only an altar of sorts, as well as a visual symbol of resilience I sorely needed… it would connect to the long line of anti-fascist resistance fighters, and a memorial for all those lost to the Holocaust. So I expanded the remit to include other disabled heroes (Charles Xavier, Deadpool) as well as Jewish, Romani and trans exemplars. If I couldn’t find a figure that I could afford or fit in the space, I stuck a picture of them on the fake brick wall backing. I also included pictures of Hephaestos and of ‘actual’ cyborg heroes – Douglas Bader, Viktoria Modesta.
Upon that wall, I put the awful Nazi term for those they considered disposable, the ones that Niemöller forgot, the ones they truly first came for, a phrase I wanted to reclaim in the same way as we have the word ‘queer’…
“Unnütze Esser”
Useless Eaters.
The idea of ancestor worship is perhaps one of the oldest of human religious impulses. Many cultures would elevate their Beloved Dead to a form of higher spiritual significance, even to full godhood. In the various African Diaspora religions and magical systems such as voudon, this kind of elevation is still common.
From my experience with the Shrine of the Useless Eaters and half a century of working with spirit-like-entities ranging from classical gods and demons to the likes of John Constantine – while never quite believing in them, treating them as an interface to the unknowable Wyrd – I would suggest that honouring our cyborg ancestors of all stripes would be a good place to begin building a spiritual practice for cyborgs.
One advantage of this approach is that step backwards from full belief that chaos magic encourages. Allowing for the most atheist of us to play with these concepts, the ’psychological model’ of magic where the weird shit us mages do is just a set of tools to trick our brains into different kinds of functionality. As chaos magic’s unknowing godfather, Austin Osman Spare, used to say:
“Treat all such phenomena as if they are real, not as real”.
And as Alan Moore, who not only created my magical colleague John Constantine but also had a couple of odd occasions where he met him in the real world, once said:
‘The one place Gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.’
We can draw on our borgods for strength in times of crisis; we can invoke their characteristics into ourselves as needed. And we don’t have to ‘believe’ they are ‘real’: it’s a false dichotomy, as false as the one that separates our prosthetic parts from our meat and bone parts.
They are all Us.
(Much of my thinking around disability, cyborgs and magic comes from three friends and colleagues: Craig Slee aka Mr. VI, writing in Cold Albion, AI ethicist Dr. Damien Williams and my sensei David Southwell, creator of Hookland and founder of Folklore Against Fascism. I remain in their debt.
Written to Michael McCann’s score for Deus Ex: Human Revolution.)
For reasons I hope are self-evident, in this list, I draw no distinction between heroes and villains, ‘people’ and monsters. I do (mostly) draw a distinction between traumatic and elective cyborgs, leaving out the majority of the latter: a list of elective cyborgs would include pretty much all the secondary cast of Cyberpunk 2077, Deus Ex, Ghost In The Shell, half of Doktor Sleepless… and could be considered as try-and-succeed-borgs?
THEOLOGICAL
Nuada Airgetlám (‘the Silver Arm’); first king of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Silver arm was built by Dian Cécht.
Osiris; after his murder and dismemberment into 14 pieces by his brother Set, his wife Isis recovered his parts, except for his penis, which had been eaten by fish. Isis made him a strap-on.
Pelops: Greek hero, lost shoulder blade replaced with ivory construct by Hephaestos.
Icarus, kinda?
Freyja, Norse goddess of beauty, fertility, sex and war: wife of Odin; often described as weeping red-gold tears – her acclamation as a cyborg appears in the paper ‘The End Of The Human? The Cyborg Past And Present’ by Carole M. Cusack, as a post-Haraway riff.
-a version of her appears in the anime Cyborg 009 as a villain.
Vishpala, warrior-queen mentioned in the Rigvela: she lost a leg in battle and got an iron replacement The princess Vadhrimati lost a hands; gold replacement made – in both cases ‘by the gods’ (though my Hindu mythology is scant, there may be more on both these…)
Tezcatlipoca: his lost right foot replaced with obsidian.
Steve Austin/Jamie Summers/Barney Miller et al, The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-offs
Robocop.
-Half man. Half Machine. yadda yadda. A new FPS game with Peter Weller back in the role is coming soon. ) I note the not-great remake had Alex Murphy played by Joel Kinnaman, who also played Takeshi Kovacs in the first season of Altered Carbon – see below.)
The Terminators.
-For my money, the best being Cameron Baum, played by Summer Glau in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Sorry, Arnie. (Though I must also mention Catherine Weaver, a T-1000 played by Shirley Manson.)
The Daleks and Cybermen and various other villains in Doctor Who
Root, from Person Of Interest.
-The first acolyte of the first artificial intelligence/god known only as The Machine, she integrated with The Machine first through data received via Bluetooth headsets, then by an updated cochlear implant installed after being tortured by the US intelligence officer known only as Control. If you haven’t seen Person Of Interest, I highly recommend it; not only is Amy Acker’s performance amazing, so is her eventual fate. And it’s much better than Westworld.
Adam Jensen: Deus Ex . He never asked for this.
V and Johnny Silverhand: Cyberpunk 2077.
Vic Stone aka Cyborg: member of both The Justice League and Doom Patrol at various points.
Seven Of Nine, Geordi Laforge, Airiam, Keyla Detmer, Sam Rutherford et al, Star Trek
Anakin and Luke Skywalker, General Grevious etc. You know where.
Master Chief and the early generations of Spartans in the HALO games.
Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road
Camina Drummer in The Expanse. Beltalowda!
Bucky Barnes, The Winter Soldier
Deathlok, Cable, no doubt several other Marvel characters, including Tony Stark post-Extremis. (I don’t keep up with the Big Two at this point.)
Frankenstein’s Monster!! Because of the electrodes (not bolts) in his neck.
Cliff Steele aka Robot-Man in Doom Patrol
BJ Blazkowicz, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus.
Molly Millions, Johnny Mnemonic and others in William Gibson’s Sprawl stories.
(Funny how Keanu’s played two cyborgs named Johnny… woah.)
Jane #57821 in Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer
Battle Angel Alita
Motoko Kusanagi in various versions of Ghost In The Shell
–SO many in anime!
The Tin Woodman in Oz
Helva, The Ship Who Sang: protagonist of the Anne McCaffrey series. One of several ‘brainships’ constructed from deformed babies whose growth was further restricted, and then grafted into titanium shells to be fused with spaceships. (NB how Steve Austin also became a spaceship for a time.)
The Shrike, aka the Lord of Pain, Angel of Final Atonement, Angel of Retribution from Beyond Time, in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos: a six-armed metal beast of ferocious killing ability, including the use of time travel in combat. Based on the DNA of human officer Fedmahn Kassad.
Takeshi Kovacs, and many other characters in Altered Carbon. (Sadly, the author Richard K. Morgan is a huge transphobe – ironic in a series where consciousness is commonly downloaded into different constructed body ‘sleeves’ of all genders…)
Murderbot. Seriously, you need to read Martha Wells’ Murderbot Chronicles.
We3: cybernetically enhanced military project turning a cat, a dog and a rabbit into killing machines, who escape and seek freedom. One of Grant Morrison’s (they/them) most heartbreaking comics.
The Company in Kage Baker’s time travel series: orphans kidnapped by a Time Police organisation, turned into immortal cyborgs.
The Peripherals in The Peripheral (both William Gibson’s book and the TV show, especially triple amputee Connor Penske) and the Marine Haptic soldiers therein.
Many characters in Shadowrun (I have to note here the truly unpleasant trope in that universe that the more cyberware one has, the less ‘soul’ one has. Originally a game-balancing mechanic to stop players making vastly overpowered cybermages, the implicit ableism was somewhat corrected in later editions.)
Mad-Eye Moody in Those Books By That TERF Woman.
John Probe aka M.A.C.H. 1 in the early issues of the classic 2000 AD comic. Probe, (Man Activated By Computopuncture Hyperpower) was a Steve Austin rip-off with more violence and moral ambiguity.
HISTORICAL
5th century B.C.E. (via Herodotus) Hegesistratus, a Greek soldier, lost a foot to torture; wooden prosthesis
-fought for the Persians against the Spartans who mutilated him
M. Sergius Silus (via Pliny), a Roman veteran of the Second Punic War against Carthage, wore an iron hand.
Ivar The Boneless: Viking warlord, famed for his many successful attacks on Britain. Appears to have at least worn metal splints for walking (does so in the TV show Vikings). The subject of a new novel by actor and disabled activist Nabil Shaban.
Gotz von Berlichingen. In 1508, he lost his right arm in the Battle of Landhut. He could afford to buy two technologically advanced iron arms with locking hand positions. He used his good hand to set a series of springs and releases so he could manipulate the artificial hand.
Tycho Brahe and his metal nose
James Edward Hanger: US Civil War veteran and engineer who upgraded his prosthetic leg and passed on the tech.
Douglas Bader: English WWII pilot who lost both legs in a plane crash. Captured by the Germans, escaped, was recaptured and sent to Colditz Castle, the infamous prison for escapee POW’s. He insisted to the commandant that not only should he keep his aluminium legs, but he should be permitted exercise walks in the countryside… during which, he stuffed the legs with Red Cross aid package chocolate and passed it around the local German civilians to subvert the population.
CURRENT
Viktoria Modesta: if you’ve not seen her Prototype video, treat yourself. Played a fine villain in the show Killjoys.
David Aguilar aka “Hand Solo”, The Lego prosthesis guy
Oscar Pistorius: perhaps the most problematic fave on the list, what with being a murderer and all.
Ruby Rose (she/they): the John Wick star suffered an injury while playing Batwoman on TV and had the same spinal operation that I did… and had to return to work a week later. She left the show after one season, citing this and other issues with the production.
Been quite a while since I wrote anything here. This is why.
My last public performance was at a Discordian-related event in London, Journey To Nutopia, on 23 Feb 2020ce. The subject was ‘Magic Is Real’.
In my talk, called ‘Tales From The Interface’ (which you can read below), I explored ideas around authenticity and the use of fiction in magic, referring to certain related work of the comics author Warren Ellis. The last part of the talk was a slide which read:
MAGIC WORKS
KNOW YOUR PATCH
LOVE MATTERS
PUNCH NAZIS
Three days after returning home from the gig, I fell ill. Like flu, but with more sweating and shaking. And it just would not go away.
(Four months after that, as I also note below, Ellis was outed as a serial sexual predator, having used his fame and influence to manipulate literally hundreds of young women in his profession for years. I could say much more about this, but I note it here because taking great care in who you listen to and why is a factor in how we got into this mess.)
Although I didn’t lose my sense of smell, a couple of weeks in I decided my other symptoms were close enough to this weird new disease known as SARS-COVID-19 to justify spending a delightful day playing NHS phone-chess, being passed from 111 to the COVID hotline to my surgery and back, only to be told that a diabetic with a chronic inflammatory disorder in his fifties wasn’t considered high risk enough to test for the disease because I hadn’t knowingly had contact with anyone who’d been out of the country recently.
Though I was getting sicker, I wasn’t in major respiratory distress. Rather than burden the NHS further, I stayed home. I’d handled twenty years of diabetes and arthritis: I’d had my throat cut by professionals and titanium bolted into my neck bones. I figured that I could tough this out for maybe three or four more months before completely losing my shit.
It has now been one thousand days since my illness began.
Just run that number around your head for a moment.
A thousand days. Twenty-four thousand hours.
One comparison would be that it was the length of the presidency of John F. Kennedy. Another would be, three-fifths the length of World War I and half the length of World War II.
In that time, I have become far more sick and disabled than I already was. I’ve lost most of my energy and resilience, in a manner extremely reminiscent of ME/CFS (my wife having suffered from this for 30 years, its effects are all too familiar).
I now only have the ability to leave the house for necessary medical or household reasons (always masked), and when I do, I usually fall prey to PEM – post-exertion malaise, where my chronic fatigue symptoms worsen and my body simply refuses to do anything but the basics for days after.
(I once had to spend 3 days doing nothing but shake after taking out a heavy bin bag.)
If I forget to put my N95 mask on when I answer the door for the post, I catch colds and flu at the drop of a hat.
I spent most of this time literally trembling at the cellular level, trying to sleep while drenched in sweat every night and soaking for half the day. As the condition worsened, I developed spasms in my arms, hands and sometimes my face. And my brain just… stopped working as well as it used to. We call it ‘brain fog’ but that doesn’t begin to cover how scary losing your cognition, your mind, actually is.
(I also have bouts of hiccups every single day, several times a day. Hiccups are hilarious, right? One of those basically funny bodily functions, like farting. Trust me, they stop being at all funny after the first few months.)
The process of traveling through various parts of the NHS with this ailment, while it was simultaneously being bombarded with Covid cases and strangled by Tory budget cuts has been… educational. In the second year, I was finally put onto what is delightfully termed the Vague Symptoms Path (also known as, somewhat ironically considering how long it took to reach it, the Rapid Diagnostic Services). This is a process of wide-scale tests to try and work out the cause of illnesses which are non-trivial to diagnose. It’s mostly a process of elimination.
At this point, they’re pretty sure I don’t have one of the major forms of cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Lyme Disease, a variety of heart, liver and kidney diseases, brucellosis or thyroid nodules.
And, it’s not lupus.
After another year of waiting, I’m getting to see a neurologist really soon now…
In the last few months, a kindly GP decided that, if I couldn’t be diagnosed then they could at least try and treat the symptoms.
I was given some drugs to control the shaking and spasms – a combination of beta blockers (which have to be taken every six hours) and a muscle relaxant usually reserved for MS patients. For a month or two, I felt immensely better. The shaking and sweats pretty much stopped and the brain fog finally cleared. But they are becoming less effective. I once again have returned to trembling most of the time and the chronic fatigue symptoms never left me. Thankfully, most of my mind is still here.
Although I have never received an official diagnosis, the symptoms are a close fit what is now called Long Covid. Current estimates (which I suspect are on the low side) suggest over 1.2 million people suffer from Long Covid in the UK alone. It appears to cause damage to the entire circulatory system, possibly because of microscopic blood clots which the immune system cannot break down; the brain and heart are the two organs most severely affected. And, because of my not getting that early testing to confirm I’ve actually had Covid, they won’t admit me to the Long Covid clinic.
I have oddly fond memories of lockdown, especially compared to what followed. Weirdly, being chronically ill already, our lifestyle didn’t change very much, and my wife and I are always very content in each others’ company.
There was a sense of “we’re all in this together”. So many folk were revealed to be kind, generous and thoughtful of others in those days (like when my street, already fiercely resilient after three floods in eight years, set up doorstep disco parties every Saturday afternoon and they made me cry in the best way by playing ‘What’s Up’ by 4 Non Blondes – Sense8 fans will get why).
Meanwhile, most of the rest of the world – and the majority of the British Discordian tribe who had previously declared me as their shaman – grumbled their way through the entire lockdown. A notable event was certain members breaking lockdown to drive across national borders to enact a magical working which required no specific geographical location in which to be performed.
And, as soon as the least trustworthy and most blatantly corrupt government in British history told them they could, most of the country, and all too many of my friends, simply stopped wearing masks, went back out into the world and acted like it was all over.
As I watched all this, isolated in my house, with increasing horror, one phrase kept coming into mind…
Kobayashi Maru.
The Kobayashi Maru test first appears in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982). It’s a key event in Starfleet training: an exercise where a cadet crew have to try to save the ship of that name and its’ crew, which is stranded in enemy territory.
It is deliberately a no win scenario. You cannot rescue them at all, and you’ll almost certainly kill your crew trying.
The Kobayashi Mari is a test of character – an examination of how future Starfleet officers deal with something they cannot beat, can only try to ameliorate. How many people they try to save, how hard they try to do so and how they cope with failing.
(Famously, the only person to beat the test is James T. Kirk… who cheated. He got a commendation for that, but he later regretted never having actually faced that awful choice fully.)
COVID-19 was a Kobayashi Maru test for the entire world. A test of character in the face of unstoppable harm. And most of you failed it, badly.
In the thousand days that I’ve been stuck here, getting sicker and sicker, losing my ability to function in a world that increasingly excludes me and mine, I have watched people who swore they would strive for a better, more inclusive and kinder world completely abandon people like me. Running off to and organising every no-mask-mandate super-spreader event they could as soon as possible, partying in the middle of a plague. Almost completely abandoning all the creative ways and possibilities we found during lockdown to make the world a better, safer, more inclusive place for disabled and immunocompromised people.
I understand how hard it was, trust me on that. It must have been marvelous to feel free again, hug your friends, return to something like a normal life. But a fuckload of us couldn’t, and can’t, and may never be able to do so again.
For obvious reasons, I did not attend the funeral of beloved 23 tribe member Claudia Bolton. I also couldn’t bear to watch the live video of it… because from what I could see, not a single fucking one of those attending wore a mask to it. There were at least fifteen Covid cases afterward as a result. I don’t know how many of those converted to Long Covid, but I have sympathy for those for whom it did. But not much pity.
Before the brain fog symptoms caught me up, I did manage to do some writing. I was proud to have a piece in Paul Watson’s Rituals And Declarations volumes of folklore and resistance, called ‘Plastic Altars, Titanium Bones’, which talked about my cyborg transformation and the altar I created to keep me going through both that part of my Chapel Perilous and my Long Whatever, ‘The Shrine of the Useless Eaters’.
(‘Useless Eaters’ – ‘Unnütze Esser’ in German – was the Nazi term for the disabled people they rounded up, put in concentration camps and slaughtered. I intend to reclaim this term in much the same way we queers have reclaimed that one.)
Among the figures on the Shrine is Adam Jensen, protagonist of the Deus Ex prequel games, whose often-memed phrase was one I said to myself a lot during these thousand days…
“I never asked for this”.
The other thing I wrote was one of a collection of new essays for the Hilaritas edition of Robert Anton Wilson’s Sex Drugs and The Occult – A Journey Beyond Limits. It’s called ‘Spiral Architect’, and it was an honour to be among the creators who contributed, including Grant Morrison. (I even recorded a video of me reading it for a related Nutopia event.)
But after that, I was pretty much a zombie for over a year.
Last year, my wife, the artist Kirsty Hall, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Anal cancer, of all things – and believe me, we did all the black humour arse jokes possible. But the humour got pretty thin when I had to listen to my beloved scream in agony every time she took a shit, for a year.
When I told the 23 community this, I received a lot of well-wishing and kind messages… and then a bunch of them immediately posted anti-vaxx and anti-mask propaganda.
One of them, when I gently suggested gaining an understanding of such crip/chronically ill terms as ‘spoon theory’, just called me a cunt and told me to fuck off. Another told me, when I refused to continue an argument about a mutual acquaintance because I didn’t have the spoons (physical and mental energy) to do so, accused me of “hiding behind my disability”.
Failing the Kobayashi Maru while laughing your arses off.
Kirsty, thanks to the excellent work of St. James’ Hospital in Leeds, is now in full remission, but that year of fear and agony took its toll on both of us.
Kirsty underwent 6 weeks of radio/chemotherapy at St. Jimmy’s (the staff were fantastic… but we were aghast at how many visitors to this specialist cancer hospital did not wear masks). We spent weekdays there, staying in the hospital’s hotel wing for patients and carers – the closest thing to a holiday we have had in a long time – and coming home at weekends.
I was too ill to stay with Kirsty at the hospital for the last week, so I had to come home.
The second day I was home alone, 2 years to the day after I fell ill after that Nutopia event, our beloved cat Chiana dropped dead.
I found her cold, stiff corpse at the top of the stairs… then had to phone Kirsty at the cancer hospital to tell her, and then make arrangements for Chiana’s remains… all while being barely able to stand and walk.
So, here I am, nearing three years of this. My body spends most of its time acting as though I’m terrified – over-reaction of the sympathetic nervous system is my main symptom. And honestly, I am scared. Horrified, constantly, on top of this neurochemical tempest. And so very, very angry.
I have watched the world pretend this never happened, some saying it was a conspiracy caused by 5G and transexuals.Treating it as a mere blip in the steady march of late capitalism – as our new Prime Minister said, “Eat out to help out”. Behaving like the disease isn’t still out there, killing and maiming people daily.
I witnessed a community that pledged itself to the cause of making the world a better place, of pulling the Cosmic Trigger and sharing love and strength and harmony, mostly just rolling over and abandoning its most vulnerable people, conforming with the worst instincts of increasingly fascist capitalism and acting like everything will be Just Fine. Ignoring, or even agreeing with, the blatant culling of us Useless Eaters. Acting as though my life, Kirsty’s life and the countless others still at risk just don’t matter as much as their fun. Holding biting parties during a zombie apocalypse.
Some of them, though, have been marvelous throughout this. I am especially grateful to Chris Manley, who spent a lot of time driving us to and from the cancer hospital, picking up meds for us – he truly went above and beyond for us both. Tom Baker and Dan Sumption and their players have helped keep me somewhat sane with their online tabletop role play game sessions – pretty much the only social activity I have left. (I tried to run a game of my own – an occult riff on Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books, now a fine TV show – but after a few sessions, I found that I lacked the spoons to continue… my thanks to the patient players there.)
My new Hebden neighbour James Burt has been a great friend throughout, and respectful of our needs regarding possible further contagion. Some of the tribe have continued to maintain masking and other safety measures at their events, and to make those events available online where possible – Andrew O’Neill (whose BBC radio show Damned Andrew is superb) puts many of their comedy shows on Zoom and has done several Zoom-only shows.
I am also immensely grateful that, after mourning Chiana for six months, we adopted a new cat from a local rescue centre. Her name is Luna Ferocity Shadow: she was rescued from a home where the other cats bullied her. A Child of the Secret, just like me and Kirsty. And we adore her.
But honestly? Most of the people who called me friend, comrade or their shaman now fill me with nothing but a terrible sense of disappointment, abandonment and betrayal.
Some years ago, when I could still go to large scale events, I was involved in the accidental creation of a new religion: Wonderism. It drew from the Cosmic Trigger play and surrounding events, primarily inspired by a talk by John Higgs and the resulting poem by Salena Godden which gave Wonderism its rallying cry…
“Pessimism is for lightweights”.
(My part was the closing ceremony on the last night of the play, a magic ritual with a couple of hundred participants including Alan Moore, Adam Curtis and Jimmy Cauty. In that ritual, I talked about how the root of the word ‘conspiracy’ means ‘to breathe together’.
The bitter irony of that in times where I cannot risk breathing together with others without a N95 grade mask is not lost on me.)
I have so little optimism left in me now. Maybe that means I have finally become a lightweight… or perhaps, optimism is a function of one’s carrying capacity. Mine has been somewhat reduced as of late.
(And, frankly, my idea of a lightweight these days are the people who bitched so loudly about the mental stress of having to endure six months of lockdown, from the perspective of someone who has been housebound except for necessary medical excursions for five times as long.)
What little energy and magic I have left in my undoubtedly shortened lifespan will be spent on two linked causes: anti-fascism and disability activism. I shall be working with people who have shown actual solidarity through these times and communities who have proven they can actually be trusted, such as the Hookland and Folklore Against Fascism groups, and the growing community of cyborgs inspired by the work of people like The Cyborg Jillian Weise and performance artist Viktoria Modesta.
In those thousand days, we have lost so many people. Millions of unnecessary deaths; from Covid, from the war in Ukraine, from the murders of queer and trans people as a result of the fascist propaganda against them. Some of those losses hit me very hard indeed. As I started writing this, I heard that the great SF writer Greg Bear had died. The day after that, a fascist with an AR-15 assault rifle murdered 5 queer and trans people and maimed a dozen more at a drag event in the gay venue Club Q in Colorado Springs, the day before the Transgender Day Of Rememberance.
A week before that, we lost the comics artist Kevin O’Neill and (especially tragic for me, as his voice had carried me through some of the darkest points of my life) Kevin Conroy, the gay man who was the true voice of the Batman.
The loss which hurt me the most was Andrew Vachss, who died about a year ago. Andrew – who I knew slightly online and considered a personal hero for decades – was a lawyer and novelist who devoted his life and career to the protection of abused children and helping to understand and ameliorate the impact such abuse has upon society. He coined terms like ‘circle of trust’ to describe the places where these predators hunt, and ‘Children of the Secret’ for those of us who have suffered their attentions.
(He also sent Warren Ellis – an admirer of his work – a scathing tweet when Ellis was outed as a predator.)
With the destruction of Twitter under the command of its new owner and fash sympathiser Elon Musk, who has sided with people openly posting about disposing of the Useless Eaters (using that very term), another vital part of the disabled community’s fragile network is being destroyed. Meanwhile, the predators and their enablers – the likes of Jordan Peterson and even fucking Donald Trump – are being reinstated and given free rein.
Andrew Vachss wrote a Batman novel once, called The Ultimate Evil. It contains a haiku I think about often in these days of open fascist violence and manipulation, which Bruce Wayne’s mother Martha wrote for him when she learned that she had been targeted for assassination by a network of powerful pedophiles (because she too was a crime fighter with a secret identity… that of a rich socialite wife and mother). It was left in the care of Alfred to give to her son should he ever follow in her footsteps, on the day he became the embodiment of vengeance against them.
“Warrior, heed this
When you battle with demons
Aim not at their hearts”
The other line of Andrew’s I think about nearly every day is this…
“Behaviour is truth. You are what you DO.”
I have watched what most of you have done.
Do better.
If for no other reason than for enlightened self-interest, the logical next step from the selfishness I have seen on constant display from so damn many during these thousand days.
Wear masks. N95 grade. Insist on it at your events. Stream your events: those of us who can’t go would happily pay to watch them.
Think about access to your events if you insist on holding them. By which I mean; think about who they are inaccessible to and what to do about it. Don’t just mull it over amongst yourselves – talk with disabled people about this. As the saying goes:
‘Nothing about us without us.’
Get vaccinated unless you have an actual medical reason not to, and keep getting boosters. Stay informed: I understand it’s difficult to sort the actual truth about this disease and its continued presence from the conspiracy bullshit, but you have to try.
(A good start would be science journalist Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer for his Covid coverage.)
Stop supporting people who say it’s all over or that it doesn’t matter because it only affects the old and already sick. That’s literally the fascist extermination agenda, the Useless Eater Cull. Shun their fuckwit mouthpieces like Jordan Peterson and the never-ending parade of transphobes from JK Rowling to Joe Rogan, even (maybe especially) if you share them ‘ironically’.
And, to be clear: Disabled rights, trans rights, queer rights, non-binary rights… are human rights.
There’s a saying in the crip/chronic community: “disability is the one ‘minority’ anyone can join at any time”.
Or, as I put it; unless you’re lucky enough to die very suddenly, you will become disabled as you age, if not before.
Those of us with Long Covid and other immunocompromising illnesses, the crips and the chronics, are the crew of the Kobayashi Maru; stranded alone in enemy territory.
The difference is that, instead of having to risk your lives in trying to help us, you are protecting us all. If you don’t, you will end up stranded here with us.
